Here, you are urged and encouraged to run your mouths about something important.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Bachmann Five now the Bachmann Four on Huma Abedin

It appears that those five congressmen who sent five letters to five separate Inspectors General now have a significant fracture in their already small coalition. The most controversial aspect of all the letters was found early on in the letter to the State Department's Deputy IG. In it, Hillary Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin was identified as a possible "security concern".

Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) now says Abedin's name shouldn't have been singled out.

U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney said Tuesday it was a mistake to name Hillary Clinton's chief of staff in a letter as a potentially "serious security concern" when he and four lawmakers urged officials to study the Muslim Brotherhood's role in the federal government.

Led by U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., legislators signed five letters in June beckoning federal departments to study how the Muslim Brotherhood can gain influence or intelligence. The letter sent to the Department of State singled out Huma Abedin, Secretary of State Clinton's chief of staff, while citing three of her family members' alleged ties to the Brotherhood.

The reference to Abedin struck a nerve the next month in the national media and in Congress, where criticisms came from as high up as House Speaker John Boehner and U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who spearheaded the effort, didn't backtrack or apologize afterward.

Rooney, R-Tequesta, reiterated the investigation's importance Tuesday, specifically regarding Department of Defense issues and the tragedy at Fort Hood. Unlike Bachmann, however, he said the initiative was muddled by wrongly mentioning Abedin.

"With Mrs. Abedin, we made a mistake including her name in there," Rooney said. "What got lost was a legitimate question, for the sake of using Congressman (Anthony) Weiner's wife and Sec. Clinton's assistant's name specifically in a letter. It was unfortunate."

Yes, it's election season and maybe Rooney's polling shows he's losing as a result of some bad press over this issue but backtracking at this point will only disenfranchise voters who were behind him on the matter and give those who had a problem with it more reason to back his opponent.

Nowhere does Rooney explain why he thinks naming Abedin was a 'mistake'.